DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=slashphoenix
...Once you've added an NPC and all of the related code, art and dialogue, you've done the majority of the work. Restricting that NPC from dating certain players wouldn't take nearly as long, unless you needed custom dialogue for each, somehow (usually not the case, designers plan around that - that's why you have a neutral name like "Gray Warden" or "The Avatar").

Hmm, I'm torn with what Unity said - on one side, you have a diverse range of sexual orientations, but on the other side you give the freedom of choice to the player. It certainly sucks to have your favorite character be made undateable because you wanted to play a guy or a girl specifically - that already happens in real life, why should it happen in games? Especially games like Skyrim, where the entire thing is basically about you running around doin' cool stuff, wild and free. And if the only purpose of that is to give the dateable NPCs "canon" or "realistic" orientations... it doesn't seem worth it. I suppose it makes more sense (and is probably more fun) to make the all of the NPCs dateable by anybody, and leave other various orientations to be represented by non-dateable NPCs. I don't know if that would possibly be offensive to anyone else, but it would definitely be the easiest and least limiting option.

One thing this doesn't address though, is that even people who're strictly bisexual tend to behave differently while interacting with a male partner versus a female partner. Yes, there are plenty of examples of games which allow you to romance the same characters with either a male or a female protagonist, but I'm not convinced that there are any examples of games that "make it work." I've been highly unsatisfied with Bioware's romance writing, for instance, since way back with Baldur's Gate 2, when I was just thirteen (and their writing teams are still headed by a lot of the same people now that they were back then.)

If I were making a game where you can pick your PC's gender, and romance NPCs, I would only make the same characters romanceable by either a male or female PC if I was willing to write a different set of dialogue for each scenario. It's possible to write a romance which can keep one party's gender vague and accommodate a switch just by swapping some keywords back and forth, but if you're going for a romance with depth, which draws on the finer points of how those characters interact with each other, I think it's practically always going to be a huge handicap. If I have to choose between giving all my NPCs strict orientations, and making half the potential romances unavailable to players who pick a given gender, or making every NPC bisexual with the same romance script for a male or female PC and thereby not being satisfied with a single one of the romances I wrote, I'll pick the first option every time.

ETA: I think video games as a medium actually have really significant advantages in terms of portraying romance, but that potential is on the whole so dramatically underexplored that it's no surprise if people start thinking video games are just not good for romance.

Depends on what you're putting the gender choice in for in the first place.

If the whole point of character building is mechanical, so the only reason a player would have to make, say, an orc mage, is to give their character the gameplay characteristics of the "orc" and "mage" templates, then I guess the implications might bother some people, but you're not really shoehorning anyone into story-based decisions they don't want for mechanical reasons. If the choices are driving elements of the story though, you don't want to force the player's hand on them.

Personally, I prefer just using casts of fully unique predesigned characters. If your party contains a highly accomplished swordswoman, would she be stronger if she had instead been a swordsman? Maybe, but it's a kind of meaningless hypothetical because you can't just have someone grow up a different gender from birth and be remotely the same person, and there was never a male version of her who could have joined your party in the first place.

The way I see it, if it's not painfully obvious what inspectable objects contain items and what ones don't, there should either be flavor text that's interesting and fun to read, or no hidden items. If the flavor text is boring or nonexistent, looking for items is a chore. If it's fun, then getting items is just a perk of taking your time to read it.

author=Corfaisus

author=Desertopa
And I have too many happy and sincerely romantic polyamorous people in my social circles to doubt that it's something that can work out.

I'm sincerely interested in finding out how this works for them. Can you expand on this without listing names?

Well, I know three married couples who're polyamorous; both partners can and do have additional long term romantic partners. All three couples are among the happiest married couples I know, constantly affectionate and appreciative of each other's company and everything they do together, and remain much more enthusiastic about their relationships after years together than most couples I know. They all say that they get completely different things from each of their partners, and they're satisfying in different ways, and don't force them to split their affections.

I have other polyamorous acquaintances who're not married, and have relationship styles that seem less like something I'd desire for myself, but for them I can still say they seem very happy with what they have.

An online friend-of-a-friend, and writer I follow a lot, has written an essay on how his experiences with polyamory changed his viewpoint, which I think is worth checking out.

The way most people practice polyamory, with a particular "primary" relationship and additional "secondary" ones, isn't really appealing to me personally, although it clearly works out for plenty of people. But I do see a lot of appeal in the idea of a relationship of three, maybe four people, where each person is a partner to everyone else. But this is so little the norm in polyamorous communities that I haven't even observed it, let alone experienced it, although I've been assured that such relationships do at least exist.

Actually, it occurs to me that my favorite visual novel (warning, site contains NSFW images) could broadly be described as a comedic harem political drama.

On the other hand, nobody who wants to convey a sense of what the game is actually like would call it that. It's not as if you can't write a story which combines political drama, comedy, and romantic tension between a single lead and several characters, and have it be good. The typical genre conventions clash with each other, but none of the elements have to be conveyed typically.